Virginia’s Election Was a GOP Rout—and Here Are Its Lessons

If you’re looking for lessons from last Tuesday’s Virginia election results, don’t just look to Ken Cuccinelli’s gubernatorial defeat—for which any one or combination of a dozen factors can be blamed—look as well at how the Republican candidates performed in the other two statewide races. E.W. Jackson, a fiery cultural rightist who makes Ken Cuccinelli sound like Wendy Davis, lost by 10.5 points in the lieutenant governor’s race. Mark Obenshain, who is about on par with Cuccinelli and Bob McDonnell on social issues, is up by a hair and probably heading for a recount in a 50-50 draw to become the next attorney general. What can we learn?

First, style matters. Three Republicans with roughly similar views on social policy performed very differently: the most flamboyant, Jackson, was crushed; the quietest, Obenshain, did best; and Cuccinelli, in the middle, fell short against Terry McAuliffe.

Cuccinelli’s supporters complain that he was defamed by McAuliffe’s “war on women” advertising, and Tim Carney, among others, has argued that Cuccinelli was in fact active behind the scenes in opposing the Republican legislature’s transvaginal ultrasound mandate for women seeking abortions. The trouble is that whatever the nuances of Cuccinelli’s antiabortion views, the image he’d cultivated as Christian conservatism’s champion—the very thing that earned him such ardent loyalty on the right—contributed to impressions that what McAuliffe said about his views must be true. Cuccinelli tried to send one signal to his base (I’m with you 100 percent—whatever that might mean) and another to the general voter (I’m not an extremist). That set up an uncertainty that McAuliffe could exploit, and did.

E.W. Jackson avoided any uncertainty: he was proud to be an extremist. Jackson was on the ticket because Cuccinelli’s supporters changed the nominating procedure from a primary to a convention to guarantee that their man would rout a moderate rival like Bill Bolling, who chose not to run at all. This was overkill—Cuccinelli almost certainly would have won a primary—and it wound up costing the GOP the lieutenant governor’s race, if not contributing to Cuccinelli’s own defeat. Not only did Cuccinelli not benefit from association with Jackson, but the idea that right-wing activists had taken over the Virginia GOP only reinforced a message that Cuccinelli didn’t want to be sending: if his supporters were radicals of a sort that would nominate Jackson, what did that make Cuccinelli?

Style isn’t just a question of how a candidate speaks. It’s a question of how his supporters present themselves as well. Even if Cuccinelli didn’t support the transvaginal ultrasound legislation, he was seen to be the leader of the kind of people who were responsible for it.

A second lesson is suggested by the Obenshain race. The media was abuzz after the election with analysis of why McAuliffe failed to win by a bigger margin. The margin that’s most interesting, however, is the virtually nonexistent one in the attorney general contest. In an off-year election, with Obamacare embarrassing Democrats, the best a Republican not identified with “extremism” could do was 50 percent. That ought to be a wake-up call.

Take it in the context of Virginia’s recent history. In 2006, Sen. George Allen lost his seat to a Democratic challenger by the narrowest of margins. In 2008, the state went for Obama and chose former Democratic governor Mark Warner over former Republican governor Jim Gilmore in that year’s U.S. Senate race. Republicans recovered in 2009—sweeping the statewide offices with Bob McDonnell, Bolling, and Cuccinelli—but in 2012 the state again went for Obama and again chose a former Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, over a former Republican governor (and senator), George Allen, in a Senate contest. A year later, instead of sweeping the statewide offices as last time, Republicans have lost at least two out of three.

Virginia’s demographics are diversifying and Northern Virginia continues to be colonized by federal workers and contractors, but neither trend has accelerated so much in four years to account for the GOP’s collapse. A Republican Party that could win in 2009 should have been able to get more than 50 percent of the vote in 2013.

If the GOP brand has decayed that much in four years, it’s a problem that won’t just affect Virginia in the near future: as the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato notes, the Old Dominion “has come the closest to the national average in the last two presidential elections and is probably a necessary piece of both party’s Electoral College plans in 2016.”

Tea Party-vs.-establishment tensions nationwide—illustrated by Alabama’s first congressional district special election on Tuesday, where a Chamber of Commerce-backed Republican beat a Tea Party one—have led to talk of a Republican Civil War. That’s something the Virginia GOP in particular has been fighting for at least 20 years: the first campaign I got involved in during high school was Oliver North’s 1994 U.S. Senate bid from Virginia, a three-way race in which North faced opposition from Marshall Coleman, a moderate Republican running as an independent. The Virginia party’s establishment-activist split has never been entirely overcome.

Until now, Virginia was culturally Southern enough that Republicans didn’t have to decide what kind of party they wanted to be—a hard-right party or a centrist one, the party of Mike Farris or the party of Tom Davis. The GOP could send mixed messages, run a mediocrity like George Allen, and indulge in infighting without losing too many elections. Those days are gone, as the Obenshain race shows. If Obenshain had seemed a little more like Cuccinelli, let alone E.W. Jackson, he would have lost. Whether a figure like Bolling could have done better than Cuccinelli, meanwhile, is moot: he can’t do better if he can’t even get the nomination, and Bolling knew it wasn’t worth trying.

Both in Virginia and nationally, ideological activists have had the upper hand in the GOP lately, and they’ve overplayed it. The lesson here isn’t that they represent ideas that can’t win—Chris Christie shows that antiabortion Republicans can even win in New Jersey—but that they would win more often if they check their own impulses to let their freak flags fly and hunt the RINOs to extinction.

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58 Responses to Virginia’s Election Was a GOP Rout—and Here Are Its Lessons

Bobby,
Could be, but the law in question wasn’t specifically against homosexual acts.And the victims who were being abused by a much older man were 16 & 17, older than the VA age of consent which is 15.So, the case could be pursued under the crimes against nature law instead.
I’m not giving Mr. Cucinelli points for political savvy, but his intentions may have been sincere.

McAuliffe won because the Democratic electorate isn’t that bright and highly susceptible to the rankest demagoguery.

Brought to you by the party that wanted to install Sarah Palin as a heartbeat away from the most important position in the world, and made a hero of Joe the Plumber.

As for the McCarthy’s article above, he seems to be saying that the lesson is: right wingers should keep their positions discreet, because the more the public knows about them, the less chance there is of getting elected.

This election was a failure of the national Republican party, and to a large extent, the “establishment”, including sore loser Bill Bolling, who sat at home and did not help Cuccinelli.

Are you aware that Jindahl, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and plenty more campaigned for him? Are you aware the Republican Governor’s Association spent $8 million trying to help him win.

BTW, you tell me: Virginia is home to more federal workers than any other state. Do you think the federal shutdown (and then Ted Cruz’s campaigning) helped or hurt?

Let me ask another one: when the top issue for Virginians is jobs, and they see that Cuccinelli spent significant resources as state Atty Gen. suing a climate scientist for academic fraud — how do you think polital-middle-of-the-roaders are going to view that?

Cuccinelli only lost by 60,000 votes. He was out of money (Thanks to the RNC) at a time when McAuliffe and his team were running non-stop ads 24×7. During the last 12 days of the campaign Cuccinelli’s campaign was so broke that it could run no TV Ads. Yet, he was able to whittle down a 14 point deficit to just a 1 point or so on election day. Yes, Cuccinelli ran a sloppy campaign; he had to fire his campaign manager in the closing weeks of the campaign. But, I wouldn’t call it a rout. Additionally, exiting polling showed that voters generally blamed the shutdown on both parties.

So, the point is, it’s OK to be an extremist, as long as you don’t sound like an extremist? Because I think that’s missing the point.”
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I’m missing where he’s actually an extremist.Maybe he is, but I’ve not seen the evidence yet.Plus, I don’t live in VA, so I’m probably not in a good position to even comment.
What I have observed from the news are some dumb political moves, GOP in-fighting,possible Democratic funding of the libertarian candidate,& a lot of “war-on-women” hype.

I live just over the border from VA, and Cuccinelli was well known for his extremist views, even before he announced his candidacy for the governor’s seat. He was the butt of jokes on national late night talk shows when he wanted to ban oral sex.

PMMDJ ,
Please, if you read the wording of the law he referenced & the particulars of the crime against 2 young girls that he was attempting to prosecute, it might make more sense.
All I’ve been able to find is media bias & Mr Cucinelli’s poor grasp of political street smarts.I believe he meant well.